


Mask Search

by KathrynShadow



Category: DC Cinematic Universe
Genre: Batman Laughs, Clark Worries About Everything, Gen, Identity Porn, Overthinking, Secret Identities Revealed By Google Images, mildly AU with Justice League
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-06 00:11:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12805392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathrynShadow/pseuds/KathrynShadow
Summary: It's an unusual picture, for a given measure of Bruce Wayne—none of the smarm, none of the sickening blandness that comes just shy of condescension if you listen between the lines hard enough. No smirk, no smile, just a flat line pressed thin and mirthless. So when Clark moves the scrollbar so that his face only shows from the tip of the nose down…--For the Anticlimactic Identity Porn kinkmeme prompt.





	Mask Search

**Author's Note:**

> [Full prompt:](https://dceu-kinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/1491.html?thread=668115#cmt668115) "Clark inadvertently discovers Batman's identity while putting together an article on Bruce Wayne, because he's got to scroll through like a million stock images of him and accidentally pauses mid-scroll with half of Bruce's face off the top of the screen."
> 
> Ended up being less obviously shippy than I was intending, but unfortunately, Clark is slightly less hopeless in my hands than Bruce is. :I I hope this is enjoyable nonetheless!

A pencil clatters to the desk, then off of it and onto the floor instead.

Clark fumbles, sucking in a startled breath—a moment of indecision where he goes for the pencil, then the keyboard for a hasty page down, then the mouse when all that does is bring up another picture. And then the pencil again.

It occurs to him, as he tries to twist his way underneath his desk to retrieve the thing, that no one else at the Planet office has seen the Bat up close. People have been scrolling past pictures of Bruce Wayne for years and no one's ever found them to be absolute proof that he's—

Clark cuts that thought short as if _he_ can hear it.

And then, cautiously, heart pounding for reasons he can't hope to explain, he scrolls back up. It's an unusual picture, for a given measure of Bruce Wayne—none of the smarm, none of the sickening blandness that comes just shy of condescension if you listen between the lines hard enough. No smirk, no smile, just a flat line pressed thin and mirthless. So when he moves the scrollbar so that his face only shows from the tip of the nose down…

Clark swallows and tries not to feel like a teenager doing something he shouldn't. Batman has that paternally disapproving air about him no matter how old the other person in the equation is, and—and oh. Oh.

Because Bruce was a father. Was, and is, because Richard Grayson is still alive (and flying— _oh,_ Clark thinks with a wince at that bit of accidental wording—very much below the radar), and because now there's another recent orphan in the picture. Which Clark knows because he wrote the article on Janet Drake’s actual death and Jack Drake’s practical one, and now he's a third of the way through writing a tiny followup on their son that may not even see the light of day anyway. (It's not Metropolis, after all—but Clark likes showing the happy-ish endings when he can, even when no one will read them. Especially in Gotham, where they seem to have so damn few.)

Bruce is a father. _Batman_ is a father. Batman—

Clark takes his glasses off, buries his face in his hands, and makes a pathetic sound into his palms.

* * *

The Bat is so worryingly knowledgeable of every single thing that goes on within Gotham’s borders that Clark could just take the ferry over and be confronted by a 6’4” spectre of cape and Kevlar and scowling within seconds, but even Superman is afraid of some things. He’s been instructed in no uncertain terms to _not_ use the Batphone unless there’s an emergency (he’s also been instructed not to call it the Batphone, but he has his limits), which this technically isn’t, so he doesn’t do that either. But he can’t just… not tell him.

For all he knows, Batman has some crazy high-tech mind reading bug planted in Clark’s apartment and knew the second that he figured it out. It seems pretty unlikely, but so does half the stuff in the Bat’s arsenal, including a few things that Clark was so unfortunate as to have experienced personally.

It could also just be wishful thinking on Clark’s part. He really, _really_ doesn’t want to have to explain to the man who tried to kill him _just in case_ he was a threat that he… well, could actually catch him totally off-guard if he wanted to. It’s easier to think of it just being generally known and mutually not talked about.

The vast majority of the human race has gotten one thing incredibly wrong. There are some things that Superman is afraid of besides kryptonite. The smell of burning hair. The sound of a human scream cutting itself off. The screech of steel bending. Darkness, enclosed spaces, the taste of dirt in his mouth. Social interaction, sometimes.

Normal stuff like that.

It makes him feel almost as guilty as anything ever has, but he finds himself actually hoping for something big enough to warrant the fledgeling Justice League getting called in. It’s easier than either calling Batman up, thus putting him on edge; or showing up in Gotham uninvited, thus putting him on edge.

* * *

It turns out that none of those things are even necessary. Batman calls him over the little communicator he’s hooked up for everyone, a thirty-second and mostly one-sided conversation where he’s instructed to come to the Cave because… well, there isn’t actually an explanation for that one. At least, there isn’t one that’s _given_. Batman says something about wanting to figure out his limits that could just as easily be a threat as a come-on as a genuine strategic need to know how much Superman can do on his own before trying to slot him into a team on a regular basis.

The only thing Clark says, in a voice that thankfully only sounds slightly worried as opposed to actually a little afraid for his life (and suffering the consequences of a childhood addiction to _The X-Files_ and its ilk for giving him a very vivid idea of all the terrible ways he could be studied), is “Now?”

“As soon as possible.” And then the connection closes with no further explanation.

Clark rubs his eyes and goes back to his lunch. True, it’s not _as soon as possible_ , strictly speaking… but it’ll be as soon as possible without him being immediately murdered by Perry when he came back. Verbally murdered, anyway—which, in Clark’s much less limited than normal experience, is almost as bad.

* * *

The Cave is… the Cave. It’s mostly smooth, partly carved out and partly filled in, but the way the sounds echo from the west makes Clark think that it might actually connect to a real cave at some point. He can definitely hear bats, whatever it is, and he’s pretty sure that the actual animal didn’t go for the finished-basement-slash-conspiracy-theorist’s-wet-dream look.

The first time he was down here, it had occurred to him in some distant way that he could peek through the layers of concrete and steel and try to find exactly where he was; as paranoid as the Bat was, as little as he trusted Superman, it just wouldn’t be viable to line his whole fortress with lead. He’d dismissed the thought as soon as he’d had it, because the man deserved his privacy and Clark didn’t really want to know anything that could endanger either of them, but it comes back with a vengeance now. If he looked up, would he see the glass-and-steel brick of the lakehouse? The torn apart wreck of Wayne Manor?

(Wayne Manor, right there, and it hadn’t hit him then— _god_ , he’s an idiot sometimes. He’s an investigative reporter and none of this had even occurred to him.)

Batman is surprisingly visible, waiting just around the corner from the entrance Clark knows about. He’s sitting in a chair that honestly looks more suited for an office cubicle than a supercomputer, the matte black surface of his cowl faintly illuminated by the multiple screens in front of him. He doesn’t look away from the progress bar on the lower right monitor when Superman comes in.

“You took your time,” he notes, before Clark can announce his presence with a gentle knock on the wall.

“I was working,” Clark says, lowering his hand.

“So was I.” Batman spins the chair around like he’s in a freaking James Bond movie. (Except, between the two of them, Clark probably isn’t the best fit for the womanizing secret agent here.) Clark is honestly half-expecting the fluffy white cat and everything. Or just a particularly large bat clinging to his chest.

Clark comes so incredibly close to instinctively making a quip about day jobs, and then he remembers that he actually knows what it is now, which means he should probably mention that before they get on to… whatever it is Batman might be planning to do to him today. “Before we start with… anything,” _hopefully not dissection_ , “I just, ah…”

He’s perfectly capable of speaking. He’s perfectly capable of speaking under pressure, under stress, under all kinds of extenuating circumstances. It’s just that sometimes, all the threads of an entire situation come together to form the exact same emotional feel of being eight years old and cracking the dining room table by stubbing his toe on it, and his entire grasp of the English language melts into the background.

The flatly expectant way that the Bat is looking at him from behind the cowl doesn’t help, either. Neither does him getting out of the chair; it mostly just shifts Clark from feeling like he’s been sent to the principal’s office to feeling like he’s about to get his face shoved through a wall with a mech suit. Or, as is more likely these days, the Batman Three-Word Lecture (patent pending, probably) that somehow still manages to be just as cutting as a full dissertation on exactly how and when and how badly he’d screwed something up.

Wow, okay. This is going fantastic and he hasn’t even said anything yet.

“I know who you are,” Clark says.

There is a pause. He doesn’t breathe. Batman does. “And?”

Clark blinks. It doesn’t make that reaction make any more sense. “And… that’s it?” he says. “I didn’t mean to find out. I was working on—” probably best not to mention that he’s done actual, serious journalistic work on _both_ sides of Bruce’s life— “something else, and your picture got cut off…”

And when he says it like that, it just sounds stupid.

The left corner of Batman’s mouth tightens in a completely untranslatable way. “Really,” he says.

Clark feels that it’s probably best not to answer.

“You didn’t think it was a little strange that the Cave was mysteriously connected to two places where Bruce Wayne has lived for most of his life?”

Clark opens his mouth, closes it, and crosses his arms. He really shouldn’t feel defensive about his decision to _respect the man’s privacy_ , especially since Bruce is clearly so antsy about playing his cards so close to his chest they’re lodged inside his lung tissue, but here he is. “I never looked.”

Silence. “You never—” His mouth does the thing again. And then it—

Oh.

The Bat can laugh, as it turns out. It’s one of the most simultaneously terrifying and confusing half-seconds of Clark’s entire life.


End file.
